dj bean

Bruins need to start taking high road vs. Canadiens

The win streak is over, and just like any of those 12 games, we won’t get carried away with the 13th. It was a regular-season game. That the Bruins lost wasn’t a big deal.

Bruins fans should be annoyed, however -- not because of the streak, which we should now all be able to admit was actually pretty cool, but because the Bruins still are capable of falling for Montreal’s antics.

Claude Julien said after the game that the Bruins didn’t lose because of their lack of discipline. That’s true, thanks to the officials calling a really bad game and giving Boston too many power plays. Yet they did display a lack of discipline that you would think they’d grown out of by now.

Call Monday a relapse. How P.K. Subban taking a little jab at Johnny Boychuk and putting his hands in the air like he did nothing wrong can still lure a Bruins player (Boychuk) into taking a penalty out of frustration is something else. After Boychuk landed a hip check on Subban in the second period, Subban shoved Boychuk in the back of the head, at which point Boychuk went berserk, dropped his gloves and yanked Subban down from behind. Only one penalty is going to get called there, and it did.

Totally avoidable.

"I took a bad penalty,” Boychuk admitted after the game. “I shouldn't have done that. I realized that as soon as it happened."

The thing is, the Bruins actually played well in the 2-1 shootout loss. They were the better team on the ice, at least.

Boston limited Montreal’s chances (Tuukka Rask would have had a shutout were it not for a shot going off Chris Kelly’s stick) and possessed the puck. Their biggest issue, really, was sloppiness with moving the puck, especially in the offensive zone. Too many offensive-zone possessions ended with turnovers as a result of ill-advised passes.

Yet general sloppiness can be attributed to playing in three different time zones in a short period of time, as the Bruins had done. What’s to blame for them getting too frustrated too easily with Montreal? Crankiness?

Alexei Emelin delivered a clean hip check to Milan Lucic in the third period. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Not only did Zdeno Chara go after Emelin and take a roughing minor [this isn’t déjà vu; Chara went after Emelin following a hit on Tyler Seguin last season], but Lucic questioned Emelin’s manhood over it.

"Whether it's fair, legal or whatever you want to call it, if he wasn't scared he would stand up and hit me and not go after my knees,” Lucic said. “It just shows how big of a chicken he is that he needs to go down like that to take me down. It shows what kind of player he is, and on my end you know you've got to keep your guard up at all times."

Emelin didn’t appear to be going for Lucic’s knees, but good luck changing Lucic’s mind. The play so stuck with Lucic to the point that Lucic tried exacting revenge in the third period, when he stuck his stick between Emelin’s legs and lifted it.

"Just skating by him and that's all,” Lucic said when asked for an explanation. “People are trying to say I speared him. I did not spear him, so that's it."

While Habs players accused Lucic of spearing Emelin, the national reaction was more specific, saying that Lucic had gotten Emelin in his, um, Emelins.

Just one man’s opinions, and trusting the same eyes that think Phil Collins’ cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love” is the best music video ever, but it didn’t look like Lucic got Emelin there.

Furthermore, as overheated as Lucic can get at times, you’d like to think that Lucic isn’t the type of player who would target that area. It looked like Lucic got Emelin in the rear end, but he still deserves a ton of blame: If you put your stick there and raise it, you’re asking for trouble.

Zdeno Chara, Johnny Boychuk and Milan Lucic all mean too much to the Bruins to lose their cool. Brad Marchand losing his is one thing, as that’s part of the package with him. Yet as a team, the B’s need to learn at some point to not get sucked in Montreal’s web.

“Other than tonight, most of the time against every other team we’re pretty good at keeping our composure and just focus on what we need to do to win,” Lucic said, “so down the stretch we can’t let things like that bother us.”

Fortunately for the Bruins, they don’t play the Canadiens again in the regular season. The playoffs could be a different story.

The Bruins are clearly the better team. When push comes to shove (and then maybe a couple more shoves), they should act like it.

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